Category: update

So I just finished Netflix’s new Bright movie. I’ll give you a non-spoilery rundown and my take on it, and you can decide if you’re interested.

The Bright Movie Setting

Bright is basically a Shadowrun-style urban fantasy world, where 2000 years ago the orc race joined with a Dark Lord and the rest of the races, ironically led by another orc, defeated them. Fast forward to the modern day. It’s just like the world we’re in, but there are fantasy races (orcs, elves, centaurs, dwarves, pixies) and between those races there’s a lot of bad blood. The orcs are especially oppressed because of the whole Dark Lord Thing(TM).

This is a by the book buddy-cop movie with a human senior cop protag, Scott Ward (Will Smith), and an orc sidekick, Derek Jakoby (Joel Edgerton). They snipe at each other and dislike each other, but we know in the end they’ll be a great team. Because that’s what these movies do.

Smith and Jakoby Posing For the Cameras

So Why is the Bright Movie called “Bright”?

Brights are humans and elves that can use magic wands. It seems that magic wands are the only actual magic in the world. They can basically do anything — a genie full of wishes that never runs out as long as you know the magic spell. The issue is that almost no one is a Bright –“one in a million” for humans, we hear. And if you touch a wand and you aren’t a bright, you go

KABOOOOM!

No kittens exploded in the making of Bright. Maybe.

The Rundown on the Plot (no spoilers)

Our buddy cops run across a wand and they get hunted by corrupt cops, Hispanic gangster, orc gangsters, the FBI, and an evil group of elves called the Inferni who want to bring back the Dark Lord.

My Review

Bright has loads of inventive action sequences, pretty good action editing (with a few hiccups like an orc shaman that keeps popping in from nowhere), passable but weak buddy-cop banter. It’s a solid cop movie, with one caveat:

Nothing important happens in the first 8-10 minutes. This opening is slow, sagging, and useless. If you skip in a little bit, once the real movie gets going it’s very tight.

Also: Yes, there are a few meaningless Dragons flying around the city skyline. Like a dragon is just normal, even though there’s no where in the city it could possibly land.

No, not THAT dragon!

This pissed off a few of my respected F&SF author buddies, but, hey, it’s fun. Movies are held to a much lower continuity standard that books. That’s just how things are.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, there was a terrible commercial where people said “Whassuuup” to each other over and over, and this commercial had nothing to do with writing. But…. I’m gonna use it as an excuse to update you on my writing anyway! Mwuhahaha!

First, I’m writing again. Yay!!! And for 143 days in a row! Double yayyyy!!!

My minimum is 1 sentence, and many days I get less than 100 words. But word count per day has been getting bigger, and my last session I hit 2,300+ words. Triple YAYYY!!!

If you want to know what I’m up to, I’m doing my own version of the mini habits system by Stephen Guise. Basically, it’s a really low-bar checklist so I don’t wimp out. Here’s the book that got me started, and it’s working for me:

Yes, this an affiliate link! But it’s a really good book about he started writing.

Getting stronger after hell

My writing muscles are building back up, and my prose quality is going up. I have better control over the pacing and emotional beats of my scenes, as well. Basically, I’m getting all those skills back that I lost after my Three Years of Hell (TM), where my mother died, grandfathers died, my house burned down, and I almost died and lost a lot of mental sharpness because of a surgery gone wrong.

Writing novels only for now

Writing wise, I’ve been working exclusively on novels. Honestly, I don’t have the time or the emotional fortitude to submit my short stories, so no sales there.

I’ve currently got two projects in the works:

A rewrite of novel (first book in a series)

A new novel (second book in said series)

I work on both every day, minimum 1 sentence each, and I also work on outlines (minimum one step/spreadsheet cell) or scene sketches (minimum three bullets) every day. Them’s the rules, and they’re working for me.

The daily grind!

The rewrites on the first book are soaking up most of my word count. It was a particularly hard book to edit, and I edited it 3.5 times line-by-line before I figured out what was wrong: The writing just isn’t up to my standards, and a simple edit will never fix it. Normally I’d trunk it and move on, but the structure is strong, and there are some really kick-ass scenes, and I like the characters. Complicating matters is that I’m about 22,000 words into the second book of the same series.

So I’m currently in the process of taking scene sketches and rewriting the entire book 1 from scratch. It’s the first time I’ve ever done a rewrite from scratch, and it scared the hell out of me at first. Honestly, it’s not terribly hard. It’s just loooooooong. It takes a lot of time because you’re doing double work, scene sketches, then writing. I know someone’s going to say I don’t need the sketches, but I think I do; I need the buffer so the bad writing of the earlier drafts doesn’t “infect” this one.

Results for my Writing

The results so far have been fantastic. It’s gone from a book that I couldn’t say enough bad things about to one I’m actually satisfied with. Quadruple YAAAAAY!

I know I know, you still have one more question: What ELSE am I doing (because I can’t possibly be busy enough)? Well…

So what have I been doing? Writing! Very slowly… But slow is better than no.

My brain feels rehabbed, my writing is getting stronger again. I no longer look at my old stories and feel like that kind of writing is impossible. But I’m a different person now. Less dark, less brooding. And that is reflected in my writing. And that’s fine.

my habit was DEAD ASLEEP

But I had a problem- my writing habit was dead asleep. I could do a week in a row, but then I would always miss a day, and some days 250 words seemed outright impossible. Eventually I kept giving up.

So right now I’m focusing on rebuilding the never-miss-a-day rhythm I used to have. How? By avoiding procrastination. How, you ask again? (Because avoiding procrastination is everyone’s problem.)

I avoid procrastination by removing all the road blocks. I have a super-easy goal of one new sentence every day. Even if I’m sick or crazy with work, I can still hit it, but usually I blow it out of the water. Almost never do I feel resistance for this habit, and even when I do, I tell myself — remember, one sentence and you can bail.

But you know something? Other than two days where I was terribly ill, I’ve never done just the minimum. I always do more, and sometimes way more. Sometimes a thousand or two thousand words.

I’m 15 days in with no misses, and it seems pretty do-able to keep going for a year like this. That’s my real goal. Resurrect the writing habit. Make writing and the tiny sub-habits surrounding writing automatic.

Instead of making glorious, insane goals, and then having me and my sun chariot careen drunkenly into Mount Olympus, I’ll just keep plugging away and see how it all works out. One step at a time.

So as an escape from the mundane (and a vent for stress), I started studying Go (a.k.a., Weiqi in Mandarin, Baduk in Korean). It’s the oldest board game we know of that is still played today, with boards and pieces dating from 2,000 years ago.

We call it Go because that’s what the Japanese call it, and they introduced it to the west.

If you are after a challenging, infinite game that has no luck to it, this is your game. It FAR easier to learn than chess — almost as easy as checkers — but the strategy is much deeper.

Only this last year did a computer finally manage to beat a top human player in Go. (They started beating Chess Grandmasters in the 70’s). According to one article, there are more legal board positions in the game then there are atoms in the universe. This has made Go the holy grail of AI research, because if you can make an AI that can learn to master Go, it can — by definition — master anything easier than Go.

All hail our new AI overlords, AlphaGo and (soon) Zen. May they be kind and gracious tyrants. 😉

So, I mentioned recently that I’ve been researching productivity and how to speed up my writing. Well, it’s been going pretty well. Actually, I’m lying.

I’m bouncing with joy at the results!

–Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics–

Here are my results. As always, statistics should be taken with a grain of salt:

51,780 Total Words for the entire month of January, 2016

Writing

26,747 new words

all before Jan 16, when rough draft was complete

2578.2 average WPH(words per hour)

Editing

22,276 words edited

869.7 average WPH

The remaining words fall into a misclellaneous bucket of brainstorming, plot noodling, etc.

–How Many I Keep–

I keep getting this weird question, over and over: “But how many do you keep?”

This is a weird question, that seems to assume that more productivity is worse productivity. I’ve actually seen a reverse trend. I’m getting out lots of words, and while they might not be perfect, I have, out of 17 scenes written with the process, only tossed half of one in the garbage.

…And that was a really complicated fight scene.

…And what I threw away gave me a much firmer grip on what needed to happen and what order.

So no real words lost. Instead, mostly, I end up expanding the words.

–Some Cold Water–

This is nothing compared to some authors, who get 10k words per day on a consistent, repeatable basis. I can only dream of getting there.

I’m currently at about 3-4k per day for new words, and 700-1.9k for edits.

That said, I’m doing pretty well, a lot better than any time I’ve had before. It’s massively more productive than the 0 words a day I had been getting, that’s for sure!

When you look at a field, what do you see? Do you see “green” or “grass” or even just “field”? If so, you’re not really looking.

I am looking at one now, and I see at least five to ten different shades of green, at least 3 different shades of tan and brown, and everything bit of grass, living or dead, at a different length. Even grasses of the same species look unique. They clump together, run in strips or curves, and the leave huge open spaces. Fate and randomness has textured like the rind of an orange.

This field was once a building, a vast warehouse, and the foundation of it is still there underneath, and there are tiny bits of rubble just beyond sight. The bulldozers scraped the whole surface clean once, long ago, and so the field always looks like it has been plowed for crops where their teeth dragged and then overgrown even though it has never been plowed before.

But what really amazes me are the bushes. You don’t even see them when you look at this place at first — you look and you see “field” and that’s all, and all the bushes disappear from your eyes because you see a category, a shape, an abstract object instead of the thing itself. It is cruel and heartless dominance of the abstract over the real.

Really, it’s like Plato and Aristotle had it all backward, that the abstract, perfect world of “forms” is not a thing beyond or behind reality, but an instinctive creation of the mind, a simplification that the brain resorts to in order to be able to process all of the data and sort it and organize it in a useful way. The “shadows on the wall of a cave” are not the physical world at all, but the cognitive system of grouping, classification, and ordering that our mind uses to construct meaning.

Reality is always complex, textured, nuanced, with layers of history right there, visible under the surface, between the bushes and the blades of grass, but the mind cannot handle all of this information at once. It is too much. It is not useful, not relevant to survival or thriving, and it is discarded. And that is the way it should be. Usually. But sometimes you need to turn that filter off, and you need to see what is actually HERE.

I’ve been plugging away at my novels, up to 16k words on the new novel, a Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon-style adventure that uses Tai Chi Chu’an (Taijiquan) as a central element.

I’ve also been getting a reader to plow through my Great Depression-Era Range War/Western novel; when feedback is in from that, I will send it to an agent.

Writing-wise I am consistently, if slowly, scrimshawing out words. Submission- and agent-wise I am in the doldrums, drifting about the ocean sails-up with no wind in sight.

I don’t think there’s such a thing as a writer without self-doubt gnawing at his/her bones. The current, devouring ones for me:

1) If I sell both books, can I really get away with jumping genres so wildly?

2) I don’t seem to write as cleanly or as muscularly as I used to. Will I ever be as skilled again with words?

3) The current novel looks like it will be huge, and the themes are very scattered. Am I skilled enough to pull it off? Will I have to go back and do a rewrite, mid-draft, to keep making forward progress?

There is something about loss that makes you fragile, easily cracked, breakable. Like your skin has been spun from a thin porcelain shell, and if grips your hand or arm too hard their fingers will punch through into the hollowness — the vast and bitter void — beneath.

I went to see the movie Argo the other day, and event the trailer for Lincoln made me tear up. When we got to the voice over by President Carter at the end, I broke up. I think things like this are to be expected, but I wish I was stronger. I wish that I had the willpower to be as I was before, to hit all my goals for the day like I used to, to write and exercise and practice Chinese, but I am just not there yet.

I don’t think it’s something that can be forced, either. My writing, for instance, is much weaker right now than it is, normally. I know it; I can see it in my diary entries. I just can’t FIX it. And I’m getting better, it’s just SLOW.

I told one of my friends recently that loss is like getting hit in the brain with a hammer. You have to wait for the blood to clot and the structure to heal before you can think again. There was one point where I literally felt so stupid that I thought would start drooling on myself (I think I did, actually), but that is long past now.

Just today, I played cards at lunch and was smart and sharp and clear for the first time since Mom died. I think this is a sign of things turning the corner, of my feet being back under me. But anything, even the slightest breeze, can break me.

I will have to be careful what movies I watch for a while. Anything more serious than Wreck-It Ralph I will have to pass on.